[De Forr Est]

Про Маркса. Чтобы не потерялось. Вдруг пригодится?

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier (Rhenish Prussia) in a family of a lawyer.
Studied jurisprudence and philosophy and later at Berlin University completed studies in 1841 with a degree of doctor of philosophy.
He was a most conscientious scholar, never satisfied with secondhand information but tracing facts and figures to their original sources. In preparation for Das Kapital – his major work, he read virtually every available work in economic and financial theory and practice in the major languages of Europe.
For his livelihood he turned to journalism. In 1842 he became editor-in-chief of the paper Rheinische Zeitung that was in opposition to the Prussian government. He also wrote articles for many other newspapers, published pamphlets and books.
Europe in the 1840s was not a calm place to live and to work. That was the time of a growing worker resistance to capitalist exploitation, the time of social and political conflicts resulting in a series of revolutions in 1848-49 in Belgium, France and Germany. Under those circumstances Marx undertook his serious study of political economy and came in contact with the working class.

The most prominent philosophical works by Marx are: The Holy Family (1845, in collaboration with F.Engels), Misere de la philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy, written by Marx in French, 1847), The German Ideology (1845-47, in collaboration with F.Engels).
In the philosophical works Marx and Engels set down the foundations of Marxism with the materialistic conception of history. In polemic with M.Proudon, Bruno Bauer and L.Feuerbach, Marx introduced two basic notions: that the economic system at any given time determines the prevailing ideas; and that history is an ongoing process regulated by the economic institutions which evolve in regular stages.
The first notion turned Hegel upside down. In Hegel’s view, history is determined by the universal idea (God), which shapes worldly institutions. Marx formulated the reverse: that institutions shape ideas. This is known as the materialistic interpretation of history.
Marx’s second notion, that of historical evolution, is connected with his concept of dialectics. He saw in history a continuing dialectical process, each stage of development being the product of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thus capitalism is an antithesis to the previous stage of historical development, and, in its turn, will be replaced by a new socioeconomic system – communism, under which capital would be owned in common and there would be no exploitation, no classes, no inequality.

The major work of Marx in political economy is Das Kapital (Capital, 4 vol.) with a subtitle Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Critique of Political Economy). Das Kapital is a fundamental scientific research based on the critical analysis of lots of theories of predecessors and contemporaries. It is not only a critique, but a complete and very logical model of the economic system of that day.
In his research Marx described the characteristics and the laws of development of capitalism as an economic system. He further developed the labour theory of value up to its logical end, and created the theory of surplus value. Surplus value is the value produced by hired workers in excess of the value of their own labour force. That is the essence of the capitalist exploitation and its major contradiction, which is in the base of class conflicts. Among other theoretical contributions by Marx are the theories of rent, wage, capital and profit, etc.

@темы: Schmambridge